


A Little to the Left

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Justified
Genre: Blow Jobs, Classism, M/M, Speculation, look boyd crowder is too smart to not be at least bi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:33:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22760071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: There’s a world where the Kentucky public school system is properly funded, where Harlan County attracted teachers who gave a damn. Where they give Boyd Crowder a whole pile of tests and realize his IQ is off the charts, that the charts he fits on almost don’t exist.
Relationships: Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens, minor Boyd Crowder/Ava Crowder
Comments: 10
Kudos: 76





	A Little to the Left

**i.**

There’s a world where the Kentucky public school system is properly funded, where Harlan County attracted teachers who gave a damn. 

People who don’t send Boyd Crowder to the principal’s office every day for fighting or throwing pencils into the ceiling or reading some water-logged Ray Bradbury book during math class. They give him a whole pile of tests and realize his IQ is off the charts, that the charts he fits on almost don’t exist. That he’s not lazy or stupid or a punk, he’s _bored._ Authority figures start looking at him differently, bump him into all the AP classes and find scholarships and financial aid and get that incredible brain of his onto something _more_.

That world’s a little to the left of ours, though. As it happens, they don’t even have AP classes at his high school, and the only honors class they let him into is English. It’s also the only class he has with Raylan Givens.

He sits two desks ahead of Boyd and one desk over. If Boyd angles himself just right in his chair, he can look at him without anyone accusing him of doing so.

Raylan’s been good-looking since Boyd was old enough to notice things like that, but in the past few years he’s gotten seriously _fine,_ shoulders broadening and that all-American jaw firming up. Over the summer, Boyd drove by the baseball field while Raylan was practicing in those tight stirrup pants, and he’d accidentally run Bowman’s truck off the road. 

It probably makes him queer, or whatever, to think like that. Probably something he’s supposed to be ashamed of. In another world he is, one where he doesn’t have to be confident to survive, doesn’t have to trust that every fiber of his being is exactly the way it’s supposed to be because he is the only thing he can count on.

Raylan’s so good-looking it kind of makes him want to hit something. 

Boyd jiggles his leg and wonders if he’s good in bed. Sometimes really pretty people aren’t, don’t think they got to learn any technique or skill. But the way those dark eyes seem so focused and thoughtful, Boyd bets he’s great, bets he goes down on girls until they come twice, holds them steady and firm with those big hands–

“Mr. Crowder, would you like to join the rest of us in the real world?” Miss Harper snaps, and his elbow slips off the desk. He smiles, glances up at the board. 

“Absolutely ma’am, just found myself lost in contemplation about _The Scarlet Letter._ ” This gets a few giggles, but Raylan doesn’t react to the exchange at all. 

“Why’d’you keep staring at me?” Raylan asks him after class. In another world, Boyd is guarded enough at seventeen not to jump, startled at being caught out. In this one he is so full of feelings and thoughts it’s a wonder he doesn’t explode just from carrying them. He laughs to stall for time, walks faster. 

“Now, how do you know I’m not listening to Miss Harper? It ain’t my fault your big head is in between me and an education.”

Raylan blinks, processing. “Don’t try to start shit, you know my mama won’t like it.” 

He thinks Boyd’s plotting, trying to stir up a fight between the Crowders and Givens after ten years of uneasy peace. He wouldn’t do that, not when Mrs. Givens is so sick, not when all he’d been thinking about was what it’d be like to have Raylan’s hands on him. 

“I don’t start shit, Raylan. I finish shit.” It doesn’t really make sense, but he loves the way it sounds, like a walk-off line in a gangster movie, and he picks up the pace again. There’s a world where Raylan’s long legs catch up with him easily, follow him to the parking lot where he smokes and cuts the rest of his classes and Raylan sits with him, legs tangled together. 

In this one, Boyd spends most afternoons alone and slowly failing out of the 11th grade.

**ii.**

This world’s Boyd Crowder doesn’t go to college, doesn’t graduate high school with honors. He barely gets across the finish line at all, misses their dinky commencement ceremony to drink with his family and Bowman’s girlfriend Ava, who skipped her own graduation the year before to do much of the same. 

“Were you scared of tryin’ to comb that crazy hair?” she says. They’re drunk on the floor, listening to everyone else argue and fuck with fireworks outside. Her warm thumb brushes against his ear as she strokes his dark, frizzy hair, which does grow in strange angles and full of cowlicks. “Thought a wild animal might fall out?”

“Aw, screw you, baby.” He didn’t mean to add that last word. Wishful thinking if anything. He’s had sex, of course, he’s not ten, but except for Raylan, he’s never wanted to fuck anyone as bad as he does Ava, the curves of those hips and blue eyes older than the rest of her. If he had an hour to live, he’d bury himself in this girl and die happy.

Ava squints, not sure if she wants to get mad at him for it. Her thumb rubs his ear again. 

In another world, she leans over and kisses him right there and that’s the end of the story, because he would move heaven and earth for that girl, the woman she becomes. Bowman would live to a ripe old age shackled to some other unfortunate person and Ava and him were _out,_ gone to the nicest house they could buy in the suburbs, to have a bunch of smart kids with wild, blonde hair and no funerals. 

In this world, she didn’t. She just got up to find a pack of cigarettes, and he snuck out to set off fireworks until a tree caught on fire and the cops came and arrested them all for destruction of property. He’s tried, for the first time, as an adult.

**iii.**

In this world, the military comes up, usually as a threat about forcing a little discipline on him, but also as the only option for someone like him, the white trash delinquent in secondhand jeans. He’d get out of Kentucky, the recruiter tells him. See the world that so far only existed in the books he never returns to the library.

He wants to make some money before he joins up, though, and if he gets in any more trouble with the cops they won’t take him, so he goes to the mines. In all worlds, eastern Kentucky inhales and exhales with coal dust in it’s breath. 

Part of him is stalling, too. Seeing if he can figure out a better plan if he gets himself a little more time to think. Besides, Raylan needs a ride to work. The Crowders are about the only people farther out from the mines then the Givens, so he’s been picking him up every time their shifts line up. 

He’s still in the house with Arlo, still walking by his mama’s grave every time he comes down the driveway. Boyd’s own mama has been in the ground since he and Bowman were in elementary school, but he can’t imagine it’s any easier to lose her at nineteen than it was at seven. 

Raylan is so quiet and exhausted, all the time. Boyd worries he’s gonna find him passed out in the tunnels one of these days. So he starts talking to keep him alert. A lot. He plays horrible hair-bands in the car to psych them up on the way to their night shifts. Finally, about a month into this arrangement, Raylan sits up straight in the passenger’s seat, tilts his head, and says, “If you play ‘Eye of the Tiger’ one more time, I’m gonna push you outta this car and into the slurry.”

Boyd’s mouth makes such a perfect O in surprise that Raylan actually smiles, looks back at the road. That entire shift, Boyd keeps chuckling to himself. 

“Crowders are fucking mental,” one of the older men, cutting a glance at him in the dim, strung-up lights. Raylan shrugs.

“Yeah, but they’re entertaining.”

In another world, where he went straight into the service after high school, he and Raylan don’t become friends. 

**iv.**

In another world, Raylan and Boyd don’t have to drink so much, don’t need to numb themselves quite so severely to make it to the next day. Boyd drinks more refined things than beer and cheap whiskey, lives somewhere where with red wine on the menu, where no one kicks your ass for ordering it at a bar. Here, though, plastic cups and Jack Daniels in the corner of Audrey’s will do. 

“How are you and your daddy holding up, since your mama passed?” Boyd asks. Raylan’s whole body stills for a minute, eyes down on the table. His head whips up so fast it’s like a shot went off. He’s always one for startling Boyd.

“Don’t find myself wasting too much thought on him. I’m not gonna be there much longer.”

Boyd raises an eyebrow. “You getting your own place?” _Don’t I get to drive you to work anymore?_

“I’m getting out of Harlan,” he says, not proudly, not like it’s any sure thing. Simply, a promise he’s made to himself. Boyd believes him. Maybe he’ll run into him, when he’s in the army and Raylan’s off doing...he doesn’t know what, but he bets it’ll be amazing.

Raylan sways forward a little, and his hand is pressing down on Boyd’s forearm, hard. “I’m still down in those mines when I’m twenty-one, I want you to put a bullet in my head, understand?”

Raylan is an intense whiskey drunk. Noted. Boyd smirks, knocks his knee against Raylan’s. An experiment. A little more contact. “It would be an honor to kill you, Raylan Givens.” 

He licks his lips, Raylan watches him. There is no world where Raylan doesn’t want to figure him out.

He doesn’t let go of Boyd’s arm for a long time. 

In this world, things are bad enough that Boyd Crowder is the person he trusts most in the world.

**v.**

In every world, Boyd’s the smartest guy in the room. No matter if it’s a bar with a gun pointed at him or in a NASA office far away. Even when he’s not in a room at all, but a hollowed out tunnel in the mountains.

He feels the shaking start before anyone else does. Sees the light bulbs starting to sway, flicker out. The Woolstone-B shaft’s very own canary. 

Raylan’s working a few men down, the muscles in his back moving as he chips more coal out of the earth. He makes a million decisions in half a second, lunges forward and grabs Raylan’s hand and starts dragging him towards the surface. They’re already five, ten long-legged steps out towards salvation before he thinks to start yelling, the roof is going down, move, _move._

Six men die that day in a company of thirty, including the two who had been standing on either side of Raylan. In another world, it was seven. 

They make it out into the dark night, the alarms blaring and other survivors clawing their way to the surface behind them, and the adrenaline drains out of Boyd. He falls to his knees, pulling Raylan down with him. His hardhat falls off and his glasses slip down his nose. 

Still surrounded by dark clouds of dust, Raylan lifts Boyd’s hand to his mouth and kisses his fingers. 

This is important. This is part of every story about them that’s ever existed. He does not break eye contact. Boyd’s entire body shivers.

Whenever an accident like this happens, they’re supposed to stay put until they can be counted, so the foreman can confirm how many people are actually dead before the paper and the screaming widows come. There’s a version where they do sit still, walk the line with a little more obedience. 

Raylan leads him back to Boyd’s own truck, the alarms so loud the ringing sticks in his ears. His hand shifts to encircle Boyd’s wrist. _The first time Raylan Givens cuffed me,_ he’d later think, unable to stop himself from laughing a little.

“You okay?” His voice a little hoarse from the dust and sudden exertion and maybe, just maybe, nerves.

Boyd nods and opens the passenger's side door, ushering Raylan in like they’re on some high class date. “I’ll be better the farther away we get from here.”

Raylan finally lets go of him, but only until both doors are locked, and he takes Boyd’s hand over the gear shift. His face flushes, just a little, and he knocks his hard hat off, throwing it on the ground in front of his seat and they drive away from the sound of the klaxon.

He thinks Raylan’s ribs might be bruised, the way he winces as Boyd lays him down in the bed of his truck, pulled over twenty miles down the road, inhales sharply when Boyd starts fumbling to peel off their coveralls, undo the belt on his jeans. 

His knees hike up when Boyd takes him in his mouth, hands curling in his wild, dirty hair, as he stares up at the starry sky. Boyd’s got narrow enough hips to fit between his legs with ease, the bumpy ridges of the truck bed digging into his skin. Raylan tugs at his hair, searing his scalp, and Boyd lets him, focusing on the weight of Raylan’s cock in his mouth, reaching forward to clutch the sides of Raylan’s thighs, right where they swell into his ass. 

When he comes bitter, salty down Boyd’s throat, he swallows all of it without blinking – he can do _anything_ , he is made of _adreanline,_ they’re fucking _alive_ – and Raylan tucks himself back into his pants. Boyd keels forward, pressing his face against Raylan’s stomach. The grip on his hair relaxes, starts petting the back of his head instead. He breathes in the smell of dirt and sweat and wishes he could stay lying on top of Raylan forever, feeling his skin cool and his chest rise and fall.

There’s a world where Boyd Crowder trades in rocket launchers for rocket science, grows old in Florida or Texas and dies with his name in well regarded scientific journals and on research centers dedicated in his honor. There’s another one where he marries Ava at eighteen and they love each other so deeply, so completely, they become a boring, middle-class fixture in Harlan and their children aren’t discarded or treated like dirt and that means more than any building with his name on it ever could. 

There’s a world where he dies fifty feet below the earth at nineteen. There’s a world where he stays in Raylan Givens’s arms for the rest of his life, where they realize they’re two halves of the same busted-up locket and they could make each other happy. 

Those worlds aren’t the one he lives in, though. He lives in one where smart isn’t noticed and Ava is hitched – _chained_ – to his brother and this all he gets of Raylan until he shows back up with a badge and a chip on his shoulder twenty years later. 

But he is not dying in those mines. And Raylan gets out of Kentucky and becomes amazing. And tonight, he gets tonight. He tilts his head up and sees Raylan’s made the same motion in reverse, chin pressed against his chest to look down at Boyd.

“You gotta hidden talent for that, huh?” Raylan asks, hand snaking down to push under Boyd’s waistband, palming his own half-hard cock, returning the favor. His other hand, warm and strong, rests on small of his back.

Boyd kisses him, and those soft lips taste like dust. And this moment, where Raylan smiles against him and opens his mouth a little wider to let his tongue, has to be enough. 

In this world, it’s all he’s got. 

**Author's Note:**

> I actually did once drive my car into a curb and pop the tire when I was sixteen because I got distracted by hot athletes. And now I get to pass on that humiliation to Boyd 👍


End file.
